Senior Lecturer in Romanticism

Profile

My work spans across the fields of culture, poetry, politics and philosophy, but I started my studies with a BA in English at King’s College Cambridge in 1999. You can read a little about my undergraduate days at the end of this interview here.

After completing studies at the universities of Cambridge, London and Cornell, I became Lecturer in Romanticism at Queen Mary in 2011 and now teach across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules.

You can hear me regularly on Radio 4’s Front Row, Saturday Review, and Radio 3’s Free Thinking. I write and present documentaries for Radio 4 and the World Service. You can read my arts and culture reviews in the weekend arts supplement of the Financial Times, the Guardian, Times Higher Education, and The TLS amongst others. You can also knock on my door for a chat in office hours where I usually have a tepid tea on the go.

Recent and On-Going Research

My primary interest at the moment is dress. I am writing a book on the philosophy of clothes, and I have interests in material culture, phenomenology, psychoanalysis and feminism. I’m trying to work out why what we wear matters - if you have any ideas, do drop me a line!

My first book, Keats and Philosophy, published in 2012, explored Keats’s poetic mediations on friendship, mortality, and war, casting him as a startling modern thinker. Since then, I have continued to work in poetics, philosophy and culture. In recent years, my research has branched out, examining European engagements with Islam and the East, spanning the period from the eighteenth-century to the present.

I have a keen interest in continental philosophy, particularly deconstruction, and I’ve also spent time thinking and writing about modern art and architecture.

Publications

‘Keats and Mortality’, Chapter in John Keats in Context, ed. Michael O’Neill (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

‘Listening for Leila: The Re-direction of Desire in Byron’s ‘Giaour’’, European Romantic Review (December 2013), 24:5

‘Feeling Friendship: Keats’s “This Living Hand” and the Sonnets on the Elgin Marbles’, in The Hand of the Interpreter: Essays on Meaning after Theory, ed. E. Jarosinski and M. Mitrano (Oxford: Verlag Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 107-34

‘Living On After Derrida’, Naked Punch Supplement, 11 (2008), 7-10

‘Being in the Care of Philosophy: Thinking about Rachel Corrie’, New Formations, 70 (2011), 7-22